Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Another bartering opportunity presented itself when I asked Volker (PenParadise) whether he wanted to trade some of my bookbinding work for a TWSBI Vac which I had coveted for a while. He agreed so as a part of the trade I made this journal in deep royal blue and radiant orange, some of his favorite colors.

The leather is some veg tanned and rather pricey oasis goatskin. The grain and surface are marvellous but it's much too thick for good results so there's a lot of paring to do beforehand. Luckily I own a Schärf-Fix (which is tricky to master but oh so powerful) now but even so I spent what felt like hours working on it, carefully skiving off layer after layer. It's so easy to produce holes and ruin the piece. Didn't happen here though - phew.

Inside there's chamois Karstadt System Inkjet paper with a custom printed dot grid. I hope Volker will put it to lots of use!

Monday, November 2, 2015

As daylight is becoming increasingly rare these days my "weekly pens" shots have been rather subdued this week.

As the new pen roll (which is awesome and which I still haven't shown you in full!) holds 8 pens, consequently the number of inked pens has grown to 8 as well and I'm even having difficulties sticking to this number! This is partly because I'm having so much fun mixing inks and pearl luster pigments. I used to make my own teal & gold mix before Emerald of Chivor came out but Leigh Reyes's post about colorful luster pigments pushed me right over the edge into sparkles wonderland!

Maybe that's why I love demonstrators so much these days.

Sadly the Lamy Vista hasn't worked well with my sparkling ink mixes, when none of my TWSBIs had the slightest trouble with the amount of pigment added the Vista feed kept clogging up so I've cleaned it out and filled it with Stipula Zafferano. That one is very light indeed though so I might add some red or orange to improve legibility.